The Mule

Last night I crossed yet another movie off my list by seeing The Mule.  I was very intrigued by the trailer but I found the movie itself to be boring and very forgettable.  It is a character study of Earl Stone (Clint Eastwood), a 90 year old horticulturalist whose business has been ruined by the internet but not before it took him away from his family too many times.  He is trying to make amends with his ex-wife (Dianne Wiest), daughter (Allison Eastwood), and granddaughter (Taissa Farmiga) but they are not making it easy on him, for good reason. A random encounter leads to a job as a mule for a drug cartel which he thinks of as a one time thing to earn money for his granddaughter's wedding.  However, he keeps finding ways to use the money and continues, becoming more and more entrenched.  Despite the fact that Earl is a successful mule precisely because he is unpredictable, a cartel boss (Andy Garcia) assigns him a handler (Ignacio Serricchio) who puts pressure on him to conform to their instructions which, ironically, puts him on the radar of two DEA agents (Bradley Cooper and Michael Pena).  When his ex-wife gets sick, he decides to go AWOL from a drug run to reconcile with his family which gets both the drug cartel and the DEA after him.  There are quite a few problems with this movie, in my opinion.  I did not find Earl to be a very sympathetic character because he is a racist curmudgeon who just smiles when people call him out on his derogatory comments as if he can't be held accountable for anything because he is old.  It really bothered me.  Most of the other characters do not get a lot of development and, after leaving the theater, I struggled to remember their names.  Even great actors like Wiest, Pena, and Cooper can't do much with the material.  I found the portrayal of women to be very off-putting because every character is either a shrew or a sex object.  There are long sustained shots of women twerking and Earl has, not one but two, threesomes with prostitutes.  Ew!  Earl's reconciliation (undeserved, in my opinion) with his family happens very quickly and feels contrived so it doesn't have the emotional punch that this movie needs.  Finally, there are way too many scenes of Earl driving along the highway singing along to the radio and, after a while, I found them to be boring.  There is not a lot of tension in this movie and the final confrontation between Earl and the DEA feels inevitable and anticlimactic.  Meh.  Give this one a miss.